Vintage Sunday: Postcard Finds

I was at a Tailgate Sale yesterday.  A Tailgate Sale is when an organization - in this case a childcare center - organizes a sort of flea market.  Anyone can rent a space for small fee and sell stuff (supposedly out of the back of a station wagon or small pickup, hence the term "tailgate sale.")

Anyway, one of the vendors had a box of postcards and I poked through them, picking out two pretty cool bacon-related cards:

This card shows women working in the packaging room at Swift & Company, packaging and wrapping Swift Premium Bacon.  It dates from the mid-1930's.  The back of the card reads: 'In a room cooled by washed air, and without being touched by hand, Swift & Company's Premium Bacon is sliced and packaged at the rate of more than 200 packages a minute.'  Maybe the women packaging the bacon are wearing gloves or something, because that one in the foreground on the right sure looks like she touching the bacon with her hand.

This scene shows the operation of a "typical Wilson & Co. Sliced Bacon Unit."  This one was set up for public viewing at the Century of Progress Exposition (also known as the Chicago World's Fair) in 1933.  This one shows a few more details of the operation than the Swift photo above:  The bacon slices are coming down a conveyor on the right, packaged and placed on the roundabout near the center; next they're weighed at one of four weighing stations before being handed off to be wrapped.

I got a kick out of finding two old cards with pretty much the same subject on them.  They're not very rare, though.  I found several of them for sale on eBay

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